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History

How is emptiness made and what historical purpose does it serve? What cultural, material and natural work goes into maintaining ‘nothingness’? Why have a variety of historical actors, from colonial powers to artists and urban dwellers, sought to construct, control and maintain (physically and discursively) empty space, and by which processes is emptiness discovered, visualised and reimagined?

This volume draws together contributions from authors working on landscapes and rurality, along with national and imperial narratives, from Brazil to Russia and Ireland. It considers the visual, including the art of Edward Hopper and the work of the British Empire Marketing Board, while concluding with a section that examines constructions of...

Urban microcosms are small-scale
communal spaces that are integral to, or integrated into, city life. Some, such
as railway stations or department stores, are typically located in city centres.
Others, such as parks, are less quintessentially metropolitan, whilst harbours
or beaches are often located on the peripheries of cities or outside them
altogether. All are part of a network of nodes establishing connections in and
beyond the city. Together, they shape and inflect the infrastructure of modern
life. By introducing the concept of urban
microcosm into social, cultural, and literary studies, this interdisciplinary
volume challenges the widely held assumption that city life is evenly spread
across its spaces. Sixteen...

Exploring
the changing character of Harwich, Dovercourt and Parkeston through the course
of the 19th century, included in this book is the economic, social and
political history of the borough. The book provides an overview of the
development of areas such as education, religion, public health with a strong
focus on Harwich’s maritime history.

The
borough of Harwich, including the parish of Dovercourt, lies in the far north
east corner of Essex. Its coastal location as a natural harbour at the mouth of
the Orwell river dictated that Harwich had a prominent role as a port and naval
base from the 14th century onwards. In the 19th century Harwich retained its
military function, particularly during the Napoleonic and...

This collection addresses the concept of gender in the middle ages through the study of place and space, exploring how gender and space may
be mutually constructive and how individuals and communities make and are
made by the places and spaces they inhabit. From
womb to tomb, how are we defined
and confined by gender and by space? Interrogating
the thresholds between sacred and secular, public and private, enclosure and
exposure, domestic and political, movement and stasis, the essays in this
interdisciplinary collection draw on current research and contemporary theory
to suggest new destinations for future study.

The campaigns in universities across the world to reject,
rename and remove historic benefactions have brought the present into collision
with the past. In Britain the attempt to remove a statue of one of Oxford’s
most famous benefactors, the imperialist Cecil Rhodes, has spread to other
universities and their benefactors, and now also affects civic monuments and
statues in towns and cities across the country. In the United States, memorials
to leaders of the Confederacy in the American Civil War and to other
slaveholders have been the subject of intense dispute. Should we continue to
honour benefactors and historic figures whose actions are now deemed ethically
unacceptable? How can we reconcile the views held by our ancestors...

This book examines the history and influence of
Magna Carta in British and American history. In a series of essays written by
notable British specialists, it considers the origins of the
document in the political and religious contexts of the thirteenth century,
the relevance of its principles to the seventeenth
century disputes that led to the Civil War, the uses made of
Magna Carta to justify the American Revolution, and its inspiration
of the radical-democratic movement in Britain in the early nineteenth century.
The introductory essay considers the celebration of Magna
Carta's 800th anniversary in 2015 in relation to ceremonials and
remembrance in Britain in general. Given as papers to a joint conference
of British and...

This
volume is based on two international conferences held in 2013 and 2014 at
Ariano Irpino, and at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. It contains essays by
leading scholars in the field. Like the conferences, the volume seeks to
enhance interdisciplinary and international dialogue between those who work on
the Normans and their conquests in northern and southern Europe in
an original way. It has as its central theme issues related to cultural
transfer, treated as being of a pan-European kind across the
societies that the Normans conquered and as occurring within the distinct societies
of the northern and southern conquests. These issues are also shown to be an aspect of the interaction between
the Normans and the peoples they...

Today’s Knightsbridge, the wealthy shoppers’ paradise, is a recent cross-border development. This book breaks new ground by uncovering an earlier, larger Knightsbridge and showing why its initial extent and history have been largely forgotten. Knightsbridge was the southern part of the Westminster abbey manor of Knightsbridge and Westbourne, and until 1900 covered the same area as the parish of St Margaret Westminster Detached. Pre-1900 Knightsbridge/Westminster included today’s Kensington Palace, Kensington Gardens, almost half of ‘South Kensington’, and Hyde Park west of the Serpentine (or river Westbourne). So why was so much of Knightsbridge lost to memory, becoming thought of only in terms of Westminster, Hyde or (until 1900...

Lists over 3,500 theses in progress on 1 January 2017 in both history and other departments, classified according to period and area Gives full details of title, supervisor and university Helps postgraduate students to select a topic and a supervisor, to publicise their topic and to discover others working in related fields Provides an overview of the amount and variety of current historical research for higher degrees